Joseph ibn Nagrela returned with a cargo of doors to Andalusia. In Toledo, he went to visit all the most famous blacksmiths whose skill in forging knives and swords and casting keys was incomparable, and wasted the last quarter-century of his life in its hills, casting key after key with the locksmiths, casting and re-casting in search of the one key that would open all those doors. The locksmiths said that he used all the songs, poems, dances, prayers, and charms he’d learned at the temple of Almaqa to help him, but none of the hundreds of keys that they cast was the ultimate key that could open those locks.
When Joseph ibn Nagrela was one hundred, they forged a key that opened door after door, until there was only one door left, but the excitement split Joseph’s heart in two and he dropped dead in this mosque. In the commotion surrounding the death of such a legend, the key was lost. When this apse was built, the doors were affixed around the walls, where they appeared only to those endowed with vision, inspiring creators like El Greco to search, in their own works, for the ultimate key that would open the door between humans and the divine.
A back window smashed and Rafi burst in. He was irate, but he stopped to see if Nora was alright. “Are you okay? You can’t imagine how scared I was,” he gasped. In the same breath he turned to the woman, yelling, “Are you insane? What the hell were you thinking?” The delicate touch of Nora’s fingers on his arm calmed him, and the strange gleam in her eyes struck his heart like a feverish glow, but with a queer luminosity; he felt her gaze restrain him.
“What a great bodyguard I am,” he muttered to himself. “Letting an old woman trick me!” He pushed forward into the dark mosque, shining all his suspicion at the corners to uncover the woman’s schemes, but she paid no attention to him and carried on telling Nora her story. Nora flopped back against the wall, suddenly tired, and ran her tongue over her lips to moisten their sudden cracks.
“Now. Close your eyes and imagine your Arab ancestor: once, a man came here burdened with the same longing as is in your face now. He made the opposite journey to Joseph ibn Nagrela’s voyage to Aden in search of the door: your ancestor from the Shayba Tribe crossed the seas from Aden to here looking for a key that would open a single door, that of the house of God, but instead all he found was these doors and locks.” Nora was lost amidst those mirror-image journeys; one man went after a door and another came after a key.
“Here.” She pointed to a patch on the floor of the temple and pushed Nora toward it so she could receive the vision. “Al-Shaybi spent a quarter of a century in this spot looking after the mosque, tracing the steps of Joseph ibn Nagrela, and the key to the absolute.” Rafi lingered in the apse, looking fervently for the doors that had been revealed to Nora, but the woman dragged him out. It was then that they noticed the parchment in a wooden frame, studded with shimmering gold and tiny red and green flowers, which hung on a ravaged fresco as if guarding the entrance to the apse. The woman stopped to explain: “In this sheet, al-Shaybi recorded his faith; it always pointed toward his qibla, your city, Mecca.” The writing on the parchment captured Nora’s attention; it was an old form of writing that bore no dots, so each word could be any one of numerous words and its meaning any one of many meanings.
“It’s the first page of the Surah of the Night Journey,” Rafi explained in an attempt to break the magic the woman was spinning around Nora.
“I’ll tell you more about this al-Shaybi,” she went on. “Many people have come looking for him, but I’ve kept his story a secret, waiting for a sign.” She looked at Nora. “Follow me.” She set off out of the mosque, striding through the cold high Toledo night. Around them and at every corner as they climbed the hills they could hear unseen footsteps kindled by their thudding heartbeats. Nora shivered and clasped Rafi’s arm, and he pulled her to his ribs, placing his hand over her icy fingers.
They ended up at the boarding school where they’d first met the woman that morning. In the night, the building showed its bitterness; it looked ready to jump off into the abyss behind it.
“Come in. Shhhhhh — any movement might wake the building …”
Rafi hesitated, but Nora stepped through the short wooden door, clutching his arm. The woman led them into a narrow corridor and down the staircase at the end of it to a vaulted cellar that stank of damp paper and desertion. She turned to look at them. “I’ll take you to the refuge where I hide from every fear and weakness.” Her voice stumbled thickly as if fumbling its way through the darkened alleyways of the purplish night. Nora felt dizzy in the dim light and a shiver ran from her body to Rafi’s; they were now more certain than ever that this woman was deranged. She waved at the walls, which were covered in overflowing bookshelves. “We all have our own Mecca, where we take refuge from our fear and loneliness; this is my Mecca. I find solace here among the manuscripts of your Arab ancestors and my ancestors — who were Jews before they converted to Christianity out of fear of oppression and dispossession. Look …”
She began reading out the titles of the works and Rafi realized she was speaking Arabic. “The Incoherence of the Incoherence and The Long Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle. Both by Averroes, the twelfth-century Cordoban philosopher, physician, and theologian who wrote about the immortality of the human mind through its connection to the effective mind, and the effect of that mind upon it. We still hold to his belief that we will all be resurrected in a more perfect body. I like to sum it up by saying that our open minds and hearts are the gateway to absolute knowledge and absolute existence!” She took a breath then moved to the next shelf, reciting title after title.
“But I promised to tell you about al-Shaybi … He was kidnapped by a Portuguese pirate ship on the shores of the Red Sea and brought to Iberia, where he finally escaped and made his way to Toledo. Poor al-Shaybi spent his life here as a busking storyteller, recounting stories of Aden and the women of Solomon’s Seal, who were all born with an outline of the moon on their palms, to children. He acted the stories out again and again without ever getting tired, and if you listen carefully, you can still hear the echo of his stories in the city’s walls and hills …”
Rafi and Nora strained their ears; they could no longer tell whether it was the woman speaking or the echoes of al-Shaybi’s tales echoing off the walls: “My mother was descended from the line of King Solomon and Queen Bilqis, like everyone else in the village of Solomon’s Seal. The daughters of the Seal are born with a moon on their palm, which they never close in a stranger’s face, because they believe that if the moon ever falls or is crushed, a fire will spread northward from Aden to clutch the whole of the Arabian Peninsula in its fiery grip, heralding the Day of Judgment.” With his thin teenager’s voice, al-Shaybi continued his story as the woman flitted from book to book.
“My father was the great-great-grandson of the man who bore the key to God’s House on Earth, the Kaaba in Mecca, and he went to Solomon’s Seal to search for the stolen key to the Kaaba. He settled there after falling in love with the moon-shaped birthmark on my mother’s hand. I was born there, on the mountaintops of Happy Yemen.”
The woman interrupted the echoes of the past to continue in a hoarse voice. “Al-Shaybi spent his nights in the mosque, withdrawn into the apse drawing the doors that I showed you. He was about my age, and he used to visit me to ask me about my ancestor Joseph ibn Nagrela’s journey to Aden, and they’d both sing with the same magical voice, lamenting the love they had found in the hands that bore the moon, which meant they’d both come from the same Aden. Sometimes when I looked at al-Shaybi’s head bent over those doors, it felt like he and my ancestor were one and the same. Joseph ibn Nagrela was reincarnated in al-Shaybi …” She held her breath, listening to the echo of her voice.